Wednesday, March 14, 2012

POTUS: march madness: bracket reveal.

Each year around this time I take to filling out a bracket
for the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. And each year, I try to think of a
new way to pick a winner. There’s simply no easy way to do it—teams are upset
prone, teams are overrated, people die, etc;

So, naturally, I go with POTUS to pick my winner(s). It
should be noted that any affiliation with the school counts. So, if POTUS went
there and transferred, sat on the board, whatever—it counts.

Who’s playing:

Duke (Nixon)

Davidson (Woodrow Wilson)

Virginia (Thomas Jefferson. James Madison, James Monroe)

Harvard (Adams and Roosevelt X 2, plus JFK, GW Bush, Barack
Obama)

North Carolina (Polk)

Michigan (Ford)

The Ohio State University (Rutherford B. Hayes)

Purdue (Benjamin Harrison)

Georgetown (Bill Clinton, LBJ)

Cincinnati (Taft)

Top left: Richard Nixon at Duke; top right: James Madison at Virginia; bottom leftt: John Quincy battling down low for Harvard; bottom right: Bill Clinton making opponents work for it at Georgetown.

Based on POTUS Power
Rankings, here are the seeds:

(1) Virginia:
Small front court, yes. But, let’s be real, we ain’t talking about dribblin’.
We’re talking about the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine playing on the same team.

(2) Harvard: Just
missed out on the 1 seed. I mean, John Adams and both Roosevelts boast
impressive (matchless, almost) resumes, but throw in JQA, JFK, GWB and Obama
and you’re looking at the bottom. Good thing Adams and the ‘Velts can likely
carry them through a couple of games.

(3) Georgetown: If
this were a tournament for womanizing, these power forwards would waltz their
way into history. Unfortunately, it’s not. However, they boast impressive
social reform resumes and their popularity among minorities shows a real “team
first” attitude.

(4) Michigan: Gerald
Ford was a lineman, but there’s not a greater Cinderella story in all the land
(speaking of course in terms of men who weren’t elected to the Presidency or
Vice-Presidency, yet were both).

(5) Davidson: Woodrow
Wilson brokered peace with Germany during WWI and created the League of
Nations. Total team player. And
fearless. And smart. Real smart.

(6) UNC: James K.
Polk is little, but scrappy. He was a go-getter and set goals not to set them,
but to achieve them. He's not afraid to battle either. Some could argue that his longtime rivalry with Henry Clay of Kentucky was a pre-cursor to the UNC/UK basketball rivalry of today.

(8) Cincinatti: If
Howard Taft can quit taking baths and move on to showers (much more manly), he
will be a force to reckon with inside the paint. Dude was huge. He’s got a long
and impressive rap sheet, but sadly this isn’t a tournament for former
Provisional Governors of Cuba. Check the NIT for that.

(9) Purdue: Benjamin
Harrison couldn’t win the Governorship of Indiana, but he somehow became POTUS.
He’s just like a team that can’t win a conference title, but come tourney time—
watch out. He could be a sleeper.

(10) The Ohio State
University: Talk about a bubble team. This guy, technically, didn’t win the
right to be POTUS, but oh yeah— we vote a little different in the USA. Can this
bubble POTUS pull off the improbable and silence his critics?